Searching for signal | Ray Otero

[Ray] (0:00 - 0:20)

Because we eat our own dog food, we want to be successful, and how are we going to deploy that for our customer if we don't do it ourselves? So, we're also doing it with the field folks, we're doing it with the sales folks, we're working, we're making our own chatbots, we're making our own things to help us be successful, and we're suggesting and we make sure that our customers understand that they can do that as well.

[VO] (0:27 - 0:30)

Are you ready for this? Are you ready?

[Dillon] (0:30 - 0:42)

What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup, live and with lifetime value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I've got Raymond with me.

Raymond, can you say hi?

[Ray] (0:42 - 0:43)

How are you?

[Dillon] (0:43 - 0:57)

Very good, and I am your host.

My name is Dillon Young. There's just two of us today because we are live at the Customer Success Collectives Summit in New York City. Raymond, I am so glad you're here with us.

Can you please introduce yourself?

[Ray] (0:57 - 1:33)

Yeah, so I'm Ray Otero from Brooklyn, New York, originally. I live outside of Philadelphia right now. I work for Microsoft Corporation, been there for about four years, and I have collectively around 27 years of experience in anything and everything IT.

So, you name it, I've done it. Right now, I head a global customer experience team responsible for strategic programs within Microsoft, and it's just an exciting time, and I'm working on a lot of end-to-end capabilities and things for our customers to be happier and for the people that work for us to be happier, to be quite honest. Microsoft is the tech company that won't die.

[Dillon] (1:33 - 1:35)

I feel like you guys keep reinventing yourselves. It's incredible.

[Ray] (1:36 - 1:47)

Yeah, since that time frame after Balmer, we became now a company of growth mindset, and everybody internal to our company needs to have a growth mindset and grow with the times. So, right on.

[Dillon] (1:48 - 1:58)

Ray, you know what we do here. We ask one simple question of every single guest, and that is, what is on your mind when it comes to customer experience? So, can you tell us what that is for you?

[Ray] (1:59 - 2:46)

Yeah, so on my mind, really, customer experience is not just about the support aspect of it. It really intertwines with customer success and what we do in the field. The first role I had at Microsoft was a field role, was a field leadership role, and I was responsible for a lot of strategic accounts, really meaning all of the nuts and bolts and things the customer needed to do to adopt our cloud services to be happy.

We needed to understand the customer, work backwards from what they had, and utilize a lot of the things that we do now in the CX world. So, it's not really just about support for me. It's an end-to-end experience, and now with AI and a lot of the things that we're doing, we want to make sure that gives us a better experience and gives us the time to innovate more with our customer and internally, really.

[Dillon] (2:47 - 2:56)

Man, you hit on the center of the bingo card, which is AI, and I think you guys are a little bit ahead of the curve. I imagine you can use CoPilot in your daily goings-on.

[Ray] (2:57 - 3:14)

Absolutely, yeah. CoPilot has been like the latest craze since it came to market, and when we had that Super Bowl ad in the last Super Bowl, not this one, the one before, which was a really fun thing to see, and being on a Meghan Trainor music video, too, it was kind of interesting, where she brought open CoPilot.

[Dillon] (3:14 - 3:14)

You personally?

[Ray] (3:15 - 3:32)

You were in the video? It was not the video. I wouldn't mind being on the video, right?

I don't like being on videos, but no, I think it's just been a wild ride with the CoPilot adoption and where things are headed with all the agents, the chatbots, and how that's evolving over the last year. I mean, it's just insane.

[Dillon] (3:32 - 3:49)

Yeah. You guys are employing, I mean, you mentioned this, so I'm going to go down this path of, are you guys using AI internally at Microsoft to create more room for your customer-facing professionals to sort of work their magic? Absolutely.

[Ray] (3:50 - 4:49)

Look, AI doesn't replace everything. What it does is, and this is the mantra we want people to understand, is you have a lot of use cases that are what we do day in and day out, a lot of mundane tasks, a lot of research, a lot of development, a lot of things that you could leverage this to make you a better employee, right? And we use this religiously internally now.

We have adoption rates. Every department needs to adopt our AI capabilities and learn how to use it and create it, right? Because we eat our own dog food.

We want to be successful and how are we going to deploy that for our customer if we don't do it ourselves? So, we're also doing it with the field folks, we're doing it with the sales folks, we're working, we're making our own chatbots, we're making our own things to help us be successful, and we're suggesting and we make sure that our customers understand that they could do that as well. And we can give them and share with them those use cases and we want them to know that, hey, you could do this too.

You can help enhance the journey of your engineers, your support folks, everybody.

[Dillon] (4:50 - 5:31)

I find enormous companies like Google and Microsoft and Amazon to be so fascinating because I feel the need to ask you to clarify what you work on, right? Because you guys are so big, it's like you might be the head of customer experience, but it's specific to one product type. I met a guy who just did CS for Chrome customers or Chromebook.

It wasn't even Chrome, it was Chromebook customers. That's insane to me. I don't understand that coming from really small companies.

So let's talk a little bit about what your purview is and what your customer looks like.

[Ray] (5:32 - 6:54)

Yeah. So my first role though, my customer was very industry specific, was manufacturing. As I move forward in my career now working as director of CX globally, our remit is really not a specific product.

Our remit is the behavioral adjustments, the changes end to end. Whatever the customer decides to use in our product base, we need to make sure that they're utilizing it to the base of their capabilities, but that we also are armed with the insights and the analytics that tell us what they're doing and how we could do better for their journey. So it's really a holistic view of what the customer is doing is what it is.

I could go into Azure, I could go into M365, into Dynamics, and we have the data and analytics that show us everything. Utilization, this license usage, whatever it is, but we need to look past that. We look more along the experience factor, utilizing all those common metrics terms that you probably heard out there, the effort scores and all those things.

Now we add our own little flair to it, of course, to give us a better approach to presenting this to our regional leaders to actually show them, hey, this is what you need to be doing. This is what you need to do with the product base to make it better and improve what you're doing for your line of business.

[Dillon] (6:55 - 7:00)

So you don't work with a particular segment of customer, not even size-wise?

[Ray] (7:00 - 7:14)

Nope. We work across all of them. We have folks that touch every, we have folks that touch SMC, the small to medium corporate.

We have folks on our team that touch the enterprise folks, the Northeast, the Territories, the South, LATAM, APAC, all of them. Okay.

[Dillon] (7:15 - 7:24)

Give me an example of a way in which you might go about improving upon the customer experience based on all these insights you have at your disposal.

[Ray] (7:24 - 8:18)

Yeah. Yeah. So based on the data, I mean, I can give you a very good example.

We're working through a couple of things now and one is to improve our process around understanding the feedback from the customer and making it more actionable. Okay. So it sounds really simple, but it actually is not because out of a hundred customers, only four of them statistically actually voiced their opinion.

Meaning that we need to tap into the rest of them because there honestly is a wealth of data and information to help us do our jobs better that they could leverage. So that's the aspect of actionability. Like, okay, we're going to send something, not talking about just the survey, but it's beyond that.

It's beyond that. It's making it so that we are actually truly listening to the customer and we take those verbatim seriously and then show them proactively that we're doing it. And we say, don't worry, we got this.

We are working on this.

[Dillon] (8:18 - 8:27)

Closing the loop. That's right. How do you get those customers to respond?

You're trying to pull in more than that four out of 100, right? So how do you do that?

[Ray] (8:28 - 9:41)

Keeping it simple, making sure that whatever we provide them, because the more you provide them, you're going to encounter survey paralysis. You're going to encounter lack of response. You're going to encounter all these things.

Making the responses in a way that they're actionable, open text, compounded responses and things that are very simple that are staggered. We're not doing things in like a flash all at once and saying, all right, you're going to see this. And now the customer is getting 20 different things and like, okay, they're not going to respond.

We need the customers to respond so that we can get viable feedback that we can action on. If we show them this, and if we give them something that's tangible, that they can write into it right up front and not have to wait eight, nine questions, they're going to respond more quickly. Any parting words for the audience?

Parting words is that try to keep up with the ride. I'm hearing that a lot today. There's a lot.

Just learn as much as you can about everything. Like I learned everything. I've been doing this for 27 years and I'm always learning and always taking on feedback and being humble about what I do, even as a leader.

So I suggest everybody does the same thing and just learn.

-: 10:04

Yeah. I think more than ever, obviously when you got started, AI wasn't a thing. And what if you decided a couple of years ago that you were like, yeah, I'm not going to worry about that.

It's not going to be here by the time I'm done. Things are moving so quickly now that if you are not constantly trying to educate yourself, explore, expand your horizons, then you're dead in the water, baby.

[Ray] (: 10:04

Yeah. I mean, to that point, you think about the generational achievements, even when Bill Gates came out and said, we need this OS on a desktop computer that is on every desk. Apple did the same thing.

People were skeptical. They didn't think, oh, you're going to put this on every desk. No, you're not.

It's the same thing. It's just more of all.

[Dillon] (: 10:27

Ray, that is our time. Love this conversation. And I love the way you're thinking about how it is you can improve upon the customer experience, as opposed to, I think we get caught a lot in terms of these vanity metrics, NRR, outcomes.

And I'm not a fan of NPS or customer satisfaction. I think there are a bit of red herrings, but at the end of the day, the most important thing is customer experience. How do we find that and how do we improve it for the positive?

That's right. It's a huge question. Come back sometime soon.

I will. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure.

[VO] (: 11:26

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